Unable to restore from site from setup wizard

The action starts with this message
– referer: http://jcorea-pc:8080/confluence/setup/setup-restore-start.action | url: /confluence/setup/setup-restore.action | userName: anonymous | action: setup-restore

and ends with this
– referer: http://jcorea-pc:8080/confluence/setup/setup-restore-start.action | url: /confluence/setup/setup-restore.action | userName: anonymous | action: setup-restore 2012-10-23 12:57:13,382 ERROR [http-8080-5] [atlassian.confluence.setup.DefaultSetupPersister] progessSetupStep setupStack is empty of actions.

I have attached the log so you can see what happens between these points

The attempts to restore were preceded by an mvn clean.

On both occasions where the issue occured existing data in the connected db had to be overwritten. However, note that the same data and db can be restored from the admin page once setup wizard is completed which suggests that its not an issue with these variables. That said, here are the details.

db: MS SQL 2005
data: siteExport-QAdata.zip

Tried with HSQL but it does not prompt user to restore from backup.